Miller: Politics, not policy, remains the problem in immigration debate

Related Media

Listening to incumbent Sen. Mark Udall, a Democrat, and his Republican challenger, Rep. Cory Gardner, talk about immigration reform almost made me forget why the issue remains such a tangled morass.

I had called Gardner, who represents Weld County as part of the 4th Congressional District, late in June to talk to him about the prospects for immigration reform in the wake of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s shocking primary loss to a tea party candidate. “I’m extremely frustrated that the House has not acted on immigration reform,” Gardner said during a 15-minute phone conversation, noting that five immigration reform bills have come out of committee but haven’t had a floor vote.

About a week later, Udall held a series of brief conference calls with reporters — on June 27 — to mark the one-year anniversary of the Senate’s passage of a bipartisan reform bill, and to highlight the House’s failure to act.

“A small minority of House members are preventing the country from moving ahead,” Udall said.

While there are, I am sure, important policy differences between the two on immigration, they seem to agree — at least broadly — on a lot. For example Gardner and Udall both say the system is broken.

Here’s Gardner: “You have to have a guest worker program coupled with border security, enforce existing laws, work on the entry-exit system,” he said. “I believe that we can find a way to pass that out of the House, and that’s what I continue to push for.”

And Udall: “The people who won’t work to pass comprehensive immigration reform as broadly supported are actually in favor of amnesty,” he said. “We have de facto amnesty right now. We have illegal immigration.”

They both agree that Cantor’s defeat really didn’t have that much to do with his support of immigration reform, but some may seize on it to block reform.

Gardner: “That would be a convenient excuse for the people who have been blocking immigration reform, but not something that should interfere with our ability to lead on this issue.”

Udall: “It gave the tea party another opportunity to say, ‘We can’t do this.’ I think it put fear in the heart of moderate Republicans who know we need to do the right thing.”

So why hasn’t anything passed?

Gardner blames those on the left who he said won’t accept anything but the Senate bill.

“I think you have all kinds of people who are just saying, ‘You have to pass the Senate bill, pass the Senate bill, pass the Senate bill,” he said. “I think there are a lot of people who have expressed concerns, so let’s find a way, let’s sit down together and let’s pass immigration reform that the House, the Senate and president can agree to.”

When I asked Udall about it, he took umbrage.

“Those arguments don’t hold water,” he said, noting that nearly 70 senators from both sides of the aisle voted for the bipartisan measure that has languished for a year without any proposal from the House. “They are so full of holes that water wouldn’t stay in that container for more than a second.”

Herein lies the problem. Both sides agree the system must be fixed. In broad terms, they even agree on a solution. But the debate has become focused on the process and the politics, instead of the policy.

In January, congressional Republicans released a document outlining their principles for reform. They are: border security and internal enforcement; an entry-exit visa tracking system; employment verification and workplace enforcement; reforming the legal immigration system; providing legal residency status and citizenship for children who were brought to the country illegally; and pushing those who are living here illegally to the back of the line for entry into the U.S. through existing legal channels.

The massive Senate immigration reform bill would do a lot. But in broad strokes it would accomplish many of those objectives.

Despite these similarities, Democrats and Republicans — from the House and Senate — remain compulsively stuck in a perpetual argument about who should get credit if something does pass and who is to blame because it hasn’t.

Of course, in any large policy debate the devils reside in the details. I may be guilty of glossing over very real differences. But I can’t shake the notion that the policy problems seem imminently easier to resolve than the political ones. The debate we’ve had for far too long about how to fix our immigration system has become just as dysfunctional as the system itself.